Wonderfruit 2018: The good, the bad, the trippy (PHOTOS)

The past weekend’s festivities in the fields of Siam Country Club now seem like a blurry dream, but we’re back in Bangkok — voiceless, aching, and running on very little sleep — dusting off our cameras, finding our bearings (physically and mentally), from the fifth Wonderfruit, one of Southeast Asia’s biggest music festivals and annual lifestyle events.

Or, as we now like to think of it, Thailand’s biggest choose-your-own-adventure lifestyle festival.

Here are the highlights of our experience, in photos. The good, the bad and the … r/woahdude.

On paper, Wonderfruit says that the whole point of this festival is to bring people from diverse backgrounds together, so that collectively, we can catalyze meaningful social impact — namely, sustainability, which has been the festival’s theme since it started in 2014.

Photo: Teirra Kamolvattanavith/Coconuts Media

While that ethos may be considered (somewhat) realized during the daytime, as a scatter of meditation sessions and healing rituals and whatnot carry out — Pattaya’s sun burns down at an unforgiving 30-something degrees until around 6pm, leading a large chunk of people to stay indoors until after sunset.

Wonderfruit often gets (unfairly) characterized as a celebration of depravity, mostly by people who have never attended the festival before.

It’s not really like that, especially in the daytime. There’s even a “Camp Wonder” section for the little ones. Hundreds of kids were present on the festival grounds, and a lot of them looked like they were genuinely having a good time.

Photo: Teirra Kamolvattanavith/ Coconuts Media

It was odd, however, to see some children being exposed to crazy, PG13+ concert behavior, especially at night.

There truly is something for everyone, though. Even after three days sprinting from stage to stage, installation to installation, tent to tent within seemingly endless event grounds, we still stumbled upon new things to see, up until the very last second.

It’s as if we landed in a crazy, choose-your-own-adventure video game IRL.